There is a film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, and a musical, but there has never been a play. How I came to have the good fortune to be asked to write one I do not know, but that is what happened. During the last two years or so, I have worked to find a stage language for Ishiguro’s story, seeking to drill down into what it is that really takes place in this tale of Stevens the butler, whose life escapes him while he’s looking the other way.
I read the novel as a teenager, and went on to read most of the rest of Ishiguro’s work throughout my 20s. I liked his books because they were like swans – an image was presented, elegant and pristine, and then by increments the more violent movements propelling and sustaining that image were revealed. His books, like pearls, coalesce around grit, around terrible and barbaric moments: the destruction of a city, the harvesting of organs, the Holocaust. The action of the books seems always to me to be the revelation that civilisation is built on violence, held together by violence, that the beautiful and the ordered is only a skin, a kind of lie. It is an important observation for a writer to make in our society of the spectacle.
Naturally, I was intimidated by the thought of adapting a story that had meant so much to so many. A lot of stage adaptations are not very good. Many fail to escape their source text, and allow events to plod on in more or less the same order in which they happened in the original book or film. This is awful, because metabolically and rhythmically the theatre is entirely unlike any other medium, and needs to find its own music.
Other adaptations never seem to get past speaking “to” or “about” the source text, rather than telling the story, which always seems to me to reflect the insecurity of a writer manifesting as ego, someone uncomfortable with sharing the billing on a poster.
It’s quite rare to see an adaptation break through to the Homeric realisation that stories are, in the end, common property – free to be retold and misremembered round the camp fire – and really work to tell the story as if it had never been heard before, without any ironic lens or debt to another mode of telling.
The ways of avoiding these pitfalls are always instinctive, not easy things to express.
I came up with the structure for my Remains of the Day in an unexpected moment, as my wife and I were leaving our flat to meet friends: I delayed our departure very briefly, and drew a picture on an envelope of two lines intersecting like a sequence of DNA; that was all I ever knew of how my play would work. It never became a verbalised idea. In fact, I found myself becoming fiercely resistant to explaining my structural conceit and outlining why each scene happened when it did, simply because I didn’t verbally, intellectually, know. I just had a shape I was following, and had to place my faith in that.
I did have a few conscious ideas and questions that I bore in mind while working. When I first met Ishiguro I was struck by his telling me that, as a young man, he sometimes hitchhiked from his family’s home south of London to Winchester or Salisbury. As the present action of The Remains of the Day is a journey by car through Salisbury and into the west, this got me wondering how much he had been voyaging into memory as well as into imagination when he wrote. I thought a lot about what the answer to that question would be for Stevens, as he made his own journey west towards the woman he allowed to get away from him, Miss Kenton. Was that a journey away from home, or a journey towards it? The more I thought about that, the more I felt The Remains of the Day was a way of asking everyone who encountered it: is life a voyage out, or a journey home?
I also came to suspect there were literary influences under the surface of Ishiguro’s story that worked as a kind of key. The more I read the book, the more it reminded me of WB Yeats. This is perhaps no surprise, as I am a Yeats obsessive. Nonetheless, there seemed to me to be marked tonal similarities between the two writers.Yeats’s yearning relationship with Maud Gonne seemed like a possible model for Stevens’s relationship with Kenton. Moreover, there were one or two precise echoes of Yeats in Ishiguro’s text: a young man, in a sequence I didn’t put in my play, speculates on what it might have been like if God had made men as plants, firmly rooted in the soil, which is not an idea I’ve encountered anywhere else except in Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter”: “Oh may she live like some green laurel, rooted in one dear perpetual place”. Finally, I could not dispel the impression that the best summations I could call to mind of what The Remains of the Day is really about lay in the poetry of Yeats. In Yeats’s last poem, “Cuchulain Comforted”, Cuchulain walks among the dead and joins them, making a shroud for himself only to find he has joined the company of all the cowards who were ever driven from their homes. This is the realisation of Stevens, who over the course of his story takes “all the blame out of all sense and reason” on himself, as Yeats puts it in “The Cold Heaven”, and whose shroud is the story he leaves behind for us to read, the painful confession of his life.
Elsewhere, in “Politics”, Yeats summarises The Remains of the Day so deftly that I feel I should quote the poem in full:
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.
This, I think, is the beautiful realisation at the heart of The Remains of the Day: that a life given to serving the big world misses out entirely on the things that matter, the things you will miss when they’re gone.
This idea became a touchstone for me – a star I tried to steer towards. The greatest challenge to telling this story in 2019 is that people, whatever story they read or play they go to see, will search its pockets for allusions to Brexit. This astonishing narrowing of the focus of our critical faculties is doing great harm in our national life, as the steady dismantling of our welfare state goes practically unremarked, and phenomena such as the rising numbers of rough sleepers are no longer addressed as subjects in themselves, but rather as subordinate clauses of a more storied event. It is a particularly difficult thing to avoid in a play preoccupied with the consequences of appeasement in the years preceding the second world war. And yet, despite this story being in part about Britain’s relationship with Europe, I wanted very much to write a play that didn’t make people talk about Brexit, because, like Yeats’s poem, this story knows that we make fools of ourselves going endlessly over the same contested political turf, because that is not where our lives happen. The route out of the schisms presently besetting us does not lie in the political sphere, but in the human; we must love one another and die, and the rest is transient.
Stories are common property. Everyone who ever goes to see a play takes home their own unique version of the tale: like witnesses to a car accident, no two people will ever see the same play. This is a very important principle in adaptation, and also a liberating one. I can never know exactly what The Remains of the Day is really about; I can only know what it means to me, and feel grateful for the opportunity to try to share that with other people.
• The Remains of the Day is at the Royal & Derngate theatre, Northampton, until 16 March, then touring. Barney Norris’s The Vanishing Hours will be published in July.
